


so you run on gasoline

by iphigenias



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Therapy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 16:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4843115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphigenias/pseuds/iphigenias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <strong>** ON INDEFINITE HIATUS **</strong>
</p><p>“Since we have a new face here today,” the man begins, “We’ll start with introductions. I’m Lip, and this is Skylar.” Gene’s eyes light upon Lip’s daemon—a tricolour border collie—curled around the legs of his chair. </p><p>“Gene. This here’s Delphine.” </p><p>“What is that, French?” asks a guy on the opposite side of the circle. He looks around the same age as Gene, with a twangy accent and a shock of ginger hair. “Ya don’t sound French.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	so you run on gasoline

**Author's Note:**

> **edit:** this fic has been abandoned for the time being and very likely won't be updated again, although i'm not saying never. sorry guys
> 
> this has been sitting in my docs for about a month gathering dust, and was actually titled 'what the fuck am i doing' up until about five minutes ago. unbeta'd, because i'm lazy af, and also unfinished, NOT because i'm lazy af but because i'm really meant to be studying for exams right now. so don't expect any updates until maybe november?? maybe earlier if i'm a bad student and procrastinate. which is very possible.
> 
> so anyway. this is a daemon!verse fic, borrowed from phillip pullman's 'his dark materials' series, but if you haven't read them, a daemon is basically an outward manifestation of your soul that takes animal form. during childhood this form changes shape a lot, but will settle down into its permanent shape usually around puberty. it's taboo to touch another person's daemon without their permission, and even with their permission it's very rare, and daemons can't travel far away from the person they belong to. a daemon is usually a different gender to their human. for a list of the daemons that appear in this chapter, head down to the (spoilery!) end notes.
> 
> work and chapter titles are from halsey's ' gasoline' because i'm predictable trash. as usual, this work is based upon the fictional representations of the hbo tv show, and no disrespect is intended towards the veterans or their families. 
> 
> **warnings:** past character deaths, grief counselling, group therapy, smoking, night terrors, ptsd. probably more to come in later chapters, but i'll put extra warnings for them when they do pop up.

Delphine won’t stop fidgeting, and it’s making Gene nervous.

“There ain’t nothin’ we can do ‘cept sit n’ wait,” he tells her under his breath, tilting his head slightly towards where she’s perched on his shoulder. He can practically feel her roll her eyes at him, her exasperation only growing as he tries and fails to hide his smile in the collar of his windbreaker.

“I don’ _like_ waitin’,” she whines, her voice almost a carbon copy of Gene’s Cajun twang, though betraying a feminine edge which never fails to remind him, achingly, of his maw-maw and her Cleophas. It’s been years, more than enough time for those old wounds to scar over, but they haven’t—raw and festering, they remain deep-rooted inside his soul, a heavy sense of guilt and the doldrums of grief he hasn’t ever been able to escape.

Delphine seems to realise where his train of thought has led him—she always does, and he loves her for that—because almost instantly she quietens down, stops fidgeting, and instead nestles closer into Gene, resting her head inside the swoop of his jawline. He can feel the coldness of her beak against his bare skin, and knows its razor sharp edge rests right against his jugular, but it’s a familiar kind of coldness that he’s gotten used to over the years, ever since she settled far too young on his eighth birthday.

The office door opens, then, and Dr Lemaire-call-me-Renee pokes her head around the side. “Eugene?” she asks brightly, stepping fully into the doorway and defiantly showing off the ladder snake that’s wrapped around her upper arm. “Sorry for the wait, I was on the phone with another client. Come in.”

Gene follows her silently into the office and shuts the door behind him. It’s as brightly lit and pleasantly cool as ever, the paperwork organised meticulously on top of the mahogany desk and bookshelves. He sits in his usual chair, the one with the frayed armrest that seems to be the only thing out of place in this entire office. He likes sitting in it, because he’s out of place, too.

“So, Eugene,” Renee begins, sitting behind the desk and clasping her hands with a smile. “How’s April been treating you?”

Gene gives a neutral shrug. She knows April’s a bad month for him, because it’s the time when the memories are freshest in his mind, not only the ones of his maw-maw but all the rest, too: the acrid smell of smoke that fills his nostrils and makes it hard to breathe; the desperate edge to his lieutenant’s voice right before he and his daemon got blown to pieces; the wet, slick feeling of blood on his palms and beneath his fingernails as he held a man’s stomach in his hands and watched his daemon—a fennec fox, Emmeline, with silky soft fur and liquid brown doe eyes—turn to fine golden dust right before his eyes.

“Fine,” he says instead of putting a voice to the memories, because Renee knows all about them, anyway. Everything’s in his file, after all.

“Well,” Renee begins, breaking the silence, “I thought maybe now would be a good idea to progress onto something a little different.” Her daemon—Benoît, as Gene learned during his very first session with Renee—coils tighter around her arm. Delphine makes a soft clucking sound in the back of her throat, and Gene brings a hand up to her feathers to calm her down.

“Wha’ didja have in mind?” he asks, eyes catching on the pamphlet not quite hidden beneath her notepad, and realising the answer before his question is even fully asked.

“Group therapy,” she says gently, giving him an encouraging smile—a smile Gene’s never been able to refuse.

“Okay,” he says, even though the thought makes him feel sick with desperation and anxiety and anger. “Okay,” he says, even though the very idea of group therapy is enough to set his teeth on edge. “Okay,” he says, and holds onto Delphine like a drowning man, like a lifeline.

 

 

 

 

 

He gets home and smokes his way through a pack and a half. Delphine doesn’t like the habit, but she knows him well enough to know that he’s not giving it up anytime soon. 

His hands are shaking.

“We don’ have to go,” she tells him as he blows the smoke out of the kitchen window. The curtains are yellow with white checks and the flyscreen is torn in the upper right hand corner. “We could’ve said no. We still can say no.”

He looks at her in the rough glare of the afternoon sun. Delphine is not a daemon made for comfort, which Gene always thought strange, before the war. Most nurses and EMTs you see in hospitals and on the TV have friendly daemons, big lolloping dogs or monkeys with curling tails or even, once, a sloth Gene had seen curled around the shoulders of a medic in I Company; the kind of daemon made to cuddle with a sick kid in the paediatrics ward, or be the last thing a dying soldier sees before his eyes slide shut. Doctors and surgeons are different, their daemons often clinical and detached like themselves, but Gene—Gene ain’t no doc, no matter what his men insisted on calling him in Buttfuck, Iraq. Delphine seemed to make the men even more nervous, and more than once Gene had overheard conversations about what the hell a bird like her was doing with the man they trusted to save their lives.

After, Gene finally understood why Delphine settled in the form she did. There isn’t any conventional comfort to be sought from her knife-edged beak and talons, her silky black and white feathers, and her piercing, beady black eyes; but on the nights where Gene wakes in a sweat, reaching for the gun he doesn’t have to sleep with anymore, Delphine is there and the stinging peck she gives his earlobe when the memories just won’t leave him is enough to pull him back into the present and offer some sense of comfort, after all—just not the kind anyone else would understand.

Now, Gene looks at her, and feels the cold clarity of her emotions just like he always has. Delphine’s always been the stronger of the two of them, and Gene can’t let her down anymore.

“We’re goin’,” he says, and stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill.

 

 

 

 

 

Before the end of their last session, Renee had told Gene that the group she was sending him and Delphine to wasn’t strictly for veterans. “You might be the only one there, actually,” she said, “And there’s no requirement on you to talk about your service if you don’t want to. Everyone has their own stories, and maybe it would be good for you to hear what others have to say.”

Parked outside the community rec hall where the therapy session is being held, Gene thinks that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. He stinks of cigarette smoke and the bags under his eyes are deep enough for Delphine to perch in them. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to hold it together for an hour, especially after the dreams he had last night.

“We can always go home,” Delphine offers, and it’s this, more than anything, this admission of something dangerously akin to _defeat_ , that hardens Gene’s resolve. “No,” he finds himself saying, taking a deep breath of tobacco-stained air and letting it out in a rushing sigh. “I can do this.” Delphine gives him a sharp peck on his hand where it’s still clenched around the steering wheel, making him jerk it back reflexively. She meets his gaze, eyes beady and knowing and a reflection of Gene’s own. “ _We_ can do this,” he amends, letting Delphine hop onto her customary position on his shoulder before opening the car door and climbing out.

The rec centre is strangely quiet when he walks inside. He follows the directions Renee gave him towards one of the conference rooms in the rear of the building, and swallows heavily when he reaches a closed door with the sign “ _New Directions: Grief Counselling_ ” tacked up on an angle. He straightens the sign almost instinctively—you can take the man out of the army, but you can’t take the army out of the man—before steeling his nerves once again and knocking on the door, twice.

It swings open almost instantly. “Come in,” says the man who opened it, with a soft voice that matches his kind eyes and smile. Gene steps inside and looks around at the room, which looks almost full. He must have spent longer dithering in his car than he thought.

The man shows him to an empty chair and Gene sits, uncomfortable with the way people are staring at Delphine. He knows she’s an unusual daemon, but it would be nice if people weren’t quite so conspicuous with their curiosity. “Since we have a new face here today,” the man begins, “We’ll start with introductions. I’m Lip, and this is Skylar.” Gene’s eyes light upon Lip’s daemon—a tricolour border collie—curled around the legs of his chair.

“Gene. This here’s Delphine.”

“What is that, French?” asks a guy on the opposite side of the circle. He looks around the same age as Gene, with a twangy accent and a shock of ginger hair. “Ya don’t sound French.”

“‘m half-Cajun,” Gene says quietly, shifting a little under the intense gaze of the ginger and his daemon, an ocelot with snapping eyes and a startling fur coat. They keep staring at each other, him and the ginger, until Lip clears his throat and asks everyone else to introduce themselves, too.

Gene loses track of all the names and faces—there’s more people here in one room than he’s been around for a long time—but he does manage to memorise a few people. There’s Joe and his bull terrier Allegra; Nix and his snow leopard Domino; David and his Siamese cat Calliope, both of whom give off a disdainful air; another Joe, with Aaliyah, a delicate looking doe; and Don, with his ring-tailed lemur Pippa. The ginger introduces himself as Babe, still holding Gene’s gaze as if challenging him to say something about _his_ name this time, but Gene and Delphine stay silent. Babe introduces his daemon as Vida, and Gene swallows audibly. Vida is a beautiful name.

After the introductions, Lip begins the session properly by talking about the different ways grief manifests itself in people and why. Gene listens with half an ear, because everything Lip’s saying he’s heard before—whether it be from Renee, the doctors at the hospital, and even his pastor before he stopped going to Sunday mass. Instead, he strokes Delphine gently with one hand, his other stuffed deep inside the pocket of his hoodie, and begins using the breathing exercises Renee had given him their very first session together.

“If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or nervous, or even bored,” she had said, to both him and Delphine, “Just find a quiet place inside your mind and try these out. They’ll help more than you know.” Gene had been sceptical at first, but after using one of the exercises allowed him to narrowly avoid a panic attack on the bus back home one day, he’d become a firm believer in their benefits.

Using the breathing exercises did have its pitfalls, however, as when Gene opens his eyes from a few deep calming breaths, it’s to find everyone else looking right at him. “Uh—sorry?”

“I asked if you felt up to sharing your experiences with us today,” Lip repeats, not unkindly, and Gene fidgets with the strings on his hoodie. He can feel the weight of everyone’s gazes on him, and it makes him feel sick to his stomach. Delphine begins to make a soft chittering noise in his ear.

“If s’okay with you, I’d rather listen today,” Gene says softly, and Lip gives him an understanding nod.

“Whenever you’re ready,” he replies, then offers the question to the rest of the group. The room is silent for a moment before Don clears his throat and shifts his weight forward in his chair, drawing all eyes onto him and his daemon.

“I think I’d like to talk about Skip today,” he says quietly, Pippa chittering nervously by his side. Gene listens like the rest of the group, but still feels as though he’s intruding on something private; the kind of grief Don is feeling, the grief only felt for a losing someone impossibly close to you, is something Gene knows all too well, and he certainly wouldn’t appreciate sharing it with anyone. But Don doesn’t seem to mind; in fact, talking about what happened seems to unburden him somewhat, as though a great weight has been lifted from his shoulders.

As Don speaks, Gene can almost imagine Skip, even though he never met the guy. He can see a wicked glint of a smile in his mind’s eye, chases down the last vestiges of a full-belied laugh, can almost feel a sense of happiness swell in his gut as Don describes the way Skip used to make him feel, with his sideways banana smile and eyes like plucked stars.

When Don finishes talking, someone else takes his place. Gene doesn’t remember their name, and later, can’t even recall who or what they talked about. The details aren’t what’s important, anyway. Gene doesn’t need to hear the words to know what’s being felt, and he supposes that’s what made him such a good combat medic in the first place. Knowing without having to ask.

Before he realises it, the session runs out of time and Lip is telling them to meet back here next week, same time, same place. Delphine gives his earlobe a soft nip as he stands and Gene almost smiles, which he counts as progress. Thus far, his mental list of accomplishments is a series of _almosts._ He doesn’t know if he has the courage to make them true.

“Hey,” a sharp voice says, startling him out of his thoughts. Gene turns and meets the eyes of the ginger from before, the one who’d teased him about Delphine’s name. _Babe,_ he thinks, and tries not to wrinkle his nose at how much the word doesn’t suit the man standing before him. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said earlier,” he tells Gene, rubbing a hand along the back of his neck. His daemon is draped across his shoulders like a fur stole, and her eyes penetrate deep into Gene’s. “I don’t exactly have the best brain-to-mouth filter, ya know? And I didn’t mean to offend you—I was just curious.”

Gene gives a gentle shrug so as not to annoy Delphine. “S’okay,” he says with the ghost of a smile, tearing his gaze away from Vida’s and meeting Babe’s eyes. “You got nothin’ to ‘pologise for.” Babe still looks hopelessly unsure, and Gene feels a stirring of something deep in his gut, something he hasn’t felt in years. It takes him a moment to place it: _pity_. He recoils internally; he hates it when other people pity him, hates it more than when they tease him, which is why he’s been actively avoiding trying to feel the emotion himself. But something about Babe makes him rethink, just for a moment, and hesitate at the edge of a chasm.

Gene jumps.

“’Sides,” he continues, forcing a teasing grin onto his lips, “Y’ain’t exactly part o’ the normal names club yourself.” It’s been so long since Gene’s made a joke that the moment it leaves his lips he instantly regrets saying it; Babe just stares at him for a long moment, eyes wide, before letting out a loud guffaw of laughter and shaking his head.

“Never said I wasn’t a hypocrite,” he grins at Gene, who feels the knot of tension inside his stomach loosen. “Babe’s just a nickname, anyway, but it stuck. Only the nuns call me Edward.”

He seems to realise his mistake as soon as he made it, because his eyes widen and he reaches out with his hands as though to grab the words and shove them right back in his mouth. “Edward,” Gene just says in response, rolling the name around on his tongue. He likes the way it sounds in his mouth. “Guess I’ll see you next week… Edward.” He laughs as he ducks a play swipe from Babe and heads out of the rec centre towards his car. It’s not until he’s planted himself firmly in the driver’s seat and Delphine gives him a sharp peck on his thumb does he realise that that’s the first time he’s laughed in months—the first time he’s laughed since _before_ , actually. Gene doesn’t know how to feel about that fact.

“Good,” Delphine says softly, reading his thoughts like always. He glances over to where she’s perched on the dashboard. “You should feel good. This is progress.”

 _Progress._ It’s such a small word for what it represents. Gene gives his daemon a smile and pulls out onto the street, headed for home. Maybe group therapy wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

(But when he falls asleep, like always, the nightmares come, and not even the memory of Babe’s smile can keep them at bay.)

**Author's Note:**

> Gene = Delphine (magpie)  
> Renee = Benoit (ladder snake)  
> Babe = Vida (ocelot)  
> Lip = Skylar (border collie)  
> Liebgott = Aaliyah (doe)  
> Malarkey = Pippa (ring-tailed lemur)  
> Webster = Calliope (Siamese cat)  
> Toye = Allegra (bull terrier)  
> Nix = Domino (snow leopard)


End file.
